In an attempt to keep everyone on their toes for MWC, the Samsung Exynos Twitter account put out a teaser image hinting at a new SoC. Labeled as "coming soon," the heavy emphasis on the 9 implies that this is a new series of Samsung's in-house chipset.

It isn't hard to imagine that this new Exynos line could make an appearance in some variants of the upcoming Galaxy S8, along with the Snapdragon 835 versions that we'll likely get here in North America. There are no guarantees, however, so we will just need to wait to see what Sammy has in store for us with its 2017 lineup. Odds are that the chip will use the Korean giant's 10nm FinFET manufacturing process — the one that the Snapdragon 835 will possibly use.

Putting on our speculation hats for a minute here, there was a leaked image a few months ago that mentioned an octa-core "Exynos 8895." It would come in two versions: the 8895M and the 8895V. The M was said to be clocked at 2.5GHz + 1.7GHz and have the Mali G71-MP20 GPU, while the V would have a frequency of 2.3GHz + 1.7GHz and a Mali G71-MP18. The leak also alleged that the 8895 series would be manufactured on a 10nm process and support UFS 2.1 storage, LPDDR4x RAM, a Cat. 16 LTE modem, and 4K displays. This was never confirmed by Samsung, so take all of that with a grain of salt. It is also possible that the supposed 8895 could have been rebranded into an Exynos 9000 series. Again, this is all speculation.

In short, I think that Samsung has some awesome things waiting for us this year.